Follow by Email

Search This Blog

NEI's 2007 Wall Street Briefing

The challenge of building the new nuclear power plants that the nation needs will require innovative financing approaches and constructive input to the federal government from the financial community, among others, nuclear energy industry leaders told Wall Street analysts here today.

As the industry prepares federal license applications for more than 30 new plants and invests heavily in design and engineering work and the procurement of long-lead time plant components like reactor vessels, it also is striving to extract the value intended by Congress from the Energy Policy Act of 2005, Nuclear Energy Institute President and CEO Frank L. (Skip) Bowman said at NEI’s annual briefing for the financial community.

The legislation provides limited investment incentives for construction of new nuclear plants and other high-capital-cost clean energy technologies. But it does not by itself resolve all financing challenges, particularly with regard to the Department of Energy’s implementation of the clean technology-neutral loan guarantee program that the energy bill authorized, he said.

“The construction period is when a new nuclear project most needs credit support,” Bowman said. “Unfortunately, the Department of Energy’s interim guidelines published last year were developed without input from companies with financial expertise, and are not optimal for large power projects. So we must continue to work cooperatively with the agency as it moves forward. Constructive input from credible organizations and institutions, including the financial community, will be essential to making this program a success.”

Properly implemented, the loan guarantee program will reduce financing costs and thus reduce our consumers’ cost of electricity from the project, Bowman said.

Anthony Earley, the chairman and CEO of DTE Energy and chairman of the NEI board of directors, said the business challenges facing the industry are manageable.

“In fact, the business challenges facing nuclear energy are not necessarily larger or more formidable than those facing coal or natural gas or any other source of electric power,” Earley said.

“The climate for nuclear power is changing. We have a more complete understanding of the business risks associated with new nuclear plant construction than ever before. And I am confident in our ability to manage those risks.”

DTE two weeks ago announced its plans to submit an application to build a possible new nuclear plant to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. It is among 15 companies and consortia that are preparing license applications for as many as 33 new reactors that would be built over the next 10-20 years. By the end of this year, the industry will have invested more than $2 billion in preparing license applications, procuring long-lead components and equipment and design and engineering on advanced-design plants, Bowman said.

Currently, 103 nuclear plants operating in 31 states supply electricity to one of every five U.S. homes and businesses. Early estimates for 2006 show that they produced the second-highest amount of electricity in the industry’s history—about 787 billion kilowatt-hours (kwh)—and posted a record-low electricity production cost for fuel and operations and maintenance expenses—1.66 cents/kwh.

As the industry continues to achieve excellence in operations, it also sees growing bipartisan support, particularly among leaders in the new Congress, Bowman said. He noted comments made recently by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who told the House Science Committee recently, “In the early days of my life in Congress, I was an opponent of nuclear energy because of questions on how to dispose of the waste. Your question is good because the technology has changed, and I bring a more open mind to that subject now because I think we should look at this technology, and compare it to the alternatives…it has to be on the table.”

Bowman said that the industry is seeing renewed interest at the state level as well. Supportive legislation has passed or is being considered in Georgia, Iowa, Wisconsin, Florida, Virginia, Kansas, South Carolina and Texas.

“We see increasing evidence that state political leaders and policymakers recognize the value of a diverse energy portfolio that includes new nuclear plants,” he said.

For a copy of the presentation, which is filled with plenty of interesting and insightful data, click here (MS Word).

Comments

gunter said…

Greetings,

DOE's Bodman has indicated that even with EPACT 2005 money the revised projected time-to-completion for the first of these new white elephants has already slipped from 2010 to 2014. And nobody is even out of the starting gate with an COL application.

The record already shows that industry projected cost-of-completion at $1500-$2000/KW is not achieveable and being revised upward... Japan's new construction cost in 2003 dollars was $1796-$2827/KW.

In the words of Talking Heads:"same as it ever was... same as it ever was..."

There is no doubt that the estimated cost of large scale nuclear plants is higher today than it was a couple of years ago.

There is also no doubt that the same cost increases are affecting other large scale energy projects. Here are a few headlines for you.

Feb 21, 2007 - MSNBC "Exxon cancels gas-to-liquids project in Qatar" (Here is the stated reason: "When the first agreement between Exxon and Qatar was signed in July 2004, the GTL project's estimated cost was $7bn. Since then, costs across the industry have risen sharply, threatening its profitability.")

Feb 18, 2007 - The Desert Sun "Curtailing of oil sands conversion hurts price" (Here is some explanation from the article: Although Petro-Canada has not precluded future sales, the company believes that the substantial oil price drop and the increased cost of conversion since November have depressed values at this time.

Although most observers have focused on short term oil price volatility, few have addressed the incredible cost increases that have marked the utilization of this proven alternative to traditional hydrocarbon excavations.")

In other words - you bet that costs have increased for many of the basic components of nuclear plants like steel, concrete, and labor. It is also true that it is going to take a long time to build the plants.

We should have started a long time ago! Ever feel any guilt, Mr. Gunter, that my children are breathing dirtier air than they should be breathing?

Popular posts from this blog

The following is a guest post from Matt Wald, senior communications advisor at NEI. Follow Matt on Twitter at @MattLWald.

From the batteries in our cell phones to the clothes on our backs, "nanomaterials" that are designed molecule by molecule are working their way into our economy and our lives. Now there’s some promising work on new materials for nuclear reactors.

Reactors are a tough environment. The sub atomic particles that sustain the chain reaction, neutrons, are great for splitting additional uranium atoms, but not all of them hit a uranium atom; some of them end up in various metal components of the reactor. The metal is usually a crystalline structure, meaning it is as orderly as a ladder or a sheet of graph paper, but the neutrons rearrange the atoms, leaving some infinitesimal voids in the structure and some areas of extra density. The components literally grow, getting longer and thicker. The phenomenon is well understood and designers compensate for it with a …

If Isaiah had been a nuclear engineer, he’d have loved this project. And the Trump Administration should too, despite the proposal to eliminate it in the FY 2018 budget.

The project is a massive factory near Aiken, S.C., that will take plutonium from the government’s arsenal and turn it into fuel for civilian power reactors. The plutonium, made by the United States during the Cold War in a competition with the Soviet Union, is now surplus, and the United States and the Russian Federation jointly agreed to reduce their stocks, to reduce the chance of its use in weapons. Over two thousand construction workers, technicians and engineers are at work to enable the transformation.

Carrying Isaiah’s “swords into plowshares” vision into the nuclear field did not originate with plutonium. In 1993, the United States and Russia began a 20-year program to take weapons-grade uranium out of the Russian inventory, dilute it to levels appropriate for civilian power plants, and then use it to produce…

The question confronting the state now isn’t what the companies that owned the reactors at the time of de-regulation got or didn’t get. It’s not a question of whether they were profitable in the '80s, '90s and '00s. It’s about now. Business works by looking at the present and making projections about the future.

Is losing the nuclear plants what’s best for the state going forward?

Pennsylvania needs clean air. It needs jobs. And it needs protection against over-reliance on a single fuel source.